Tennis Tensions

Tudor Rickards is an author on creativity and leadership in business sport and management. He has published over twenty books on these subjects including Dilemmas of Leadership (3rd edition, 2015), and Mourinho Matters (2016). He an avid tennis player slightly handicapped by inherent weaknesses in his forehand which reveal themselves in play, and sometimes in print. He writes as a former Professor at the Manchester Business School. The influences on his writing are diverse, and include sport, business theory, current affairs and politics. The world of nature has also been a powerful source of inspiration, with well-publicised work on intelligent horsemanship and the bullying style of leadership that he calls Mandrill Management. Tudor was educated at Pontypridd Boys’ Grammar School and went on to study chemistry and radiation chemistry at The University of Wales at Cardiff (now Cardiff University) and post-doctoral research at New York Medical College. His recent media contributions include the BBC Radio 4 documentary Oblique Strategies. He founded the journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and is Alex Osborn Visiting Professor at State University of New York, Buffalo. His self-publishing draws on over a thousand posts originally published on his blog, Leaders We Deserve, over the period 2006-2015. He is a more competent chess player, a sport (not a ’game’, he insists) at which he represented Wales as a junior, and now completes in the middle reaches of the Stockpost league. Tudor is a self-confessed couch potato and sports commentator and a near lifetime follower of Tennis, Rugby (Wales, Ospreys, Canterbury Crusaders, Pontypridd, Manchester Business School ladies), Football (one of the Manchester clubs, including U21s, and U18s, and assorted Baseball and NFL teams watched from bars in various American cities. He lives a life rescued from irredeemable chaos by the uncomplaining (mostly) efforts of Susan, in a mythical region where the Cheshire plains meets Hogwarts Academy.